At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (32 page)

IV

This grand volume of epistles, for which the final draft is now being copied out, bears witness, letter by letter, to whatever muses I have managed to muster in the dead of night.

LAURA CERETA,
1486
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“What is more conducive to wisdom than the night?” asked St. Cyril of Jerusalem. For all of the opportunities that nighttime afforded for courting and companionship, it also permitted preindustrial folk unprecedented freedom to explore their own individuality. On myriad evenings, growing numbers of men and women devoted an hour or more to solitude and mental reflection, resulting ultimately in an enhanced self-awareness. Individuals found evenings particularly well suited to contemplation, as religious sages had for centuries. Competing obligations were fewer, while the silence created an ideal environment for self-scrutiny. “Much more fit for any employment of the mind, than any other part of the day,” opined a French writer in the seventeenth century. The author of
La Ricreazione del Savio
observed, “The day counts on labor; the night counts on thinking. Clamor is useful for the first; silence for the second.”
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Naturally, members of the middle and upper classes, by retiring to their bedchambers, enjoyed the greatest opportunity for personal reflection. Farther down the social ladder, inadequate time and space invariably made solitude harder. Still, as early as the mid-1600s, many laboring families resided in homes with more than just a single room; plus there were occasions, on pleasant evenings, to retreat to a barn or shed. In the late fifteenth century, the Parisian servant Jean Standonck labored by day at a convent only to ascend a bell tower at night to read books by moonlight. Thomas Platter, as a rope-maker’s apprentice, regularly defied his master by rising silently at night to learn Greek by the faint glow of a candle. To avoid falling asleep, he put pieces of raw turnip, pebbles, or cold water in his mouth. (Other individuals were known to wrap their heads in wet towels to stay awake.) Plainly, the well-traveled saying “The night brings counsel” held meaning for people of varying social backgrounds.
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Reading was an increasingly common pastime, despite the multitudes that remained unlettered. For the poor, exposure to printed materials was predominantly communal, limited to oral readings at spinning bees and other intimate gatherings. Early modern literacy, nevertheless, was more prevalent than one might suspect. During the late Middle Ages, a few persons outside the clergy could read and write, a trend greatly accelerated by both the Reformation and the growth of printing. Already by the seventeenth century, a large majority of yeomen and skilled artisans in the English countryside were literate, as were many urban males. Enjoying fewer educational opportunities, women were less fortunate, though there were numerous exceptions. The Stuart playwright Sir William Davenant wrote of “those mourning histories of love, which in / The dreadful winter nights, our innocent maids / Are us’d to read.” In general, literacy rates were highest in northern and northwestern Europe, though many regions witnessed a marked rise during the 1700s, caused in part by the spread of Pietism, a Protestant movement that stressed personal study of the Bible.
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Gerrit Dou,
Scholar with a Glob
e, seventeenth century.

Within well-educated households, the critical transition from reading aloud to silent reading occurred during the fifteenth century. In time, other readers would master this liberating technique. Revolutionary in scope, silent reading let individuals scrutinize books with ease and speed. No less important, it allowed them to explore texts in isolation, apart from friends and family, or masters. Reading became vastly more personal, as more people pondered books and formed ideas on their own. As Machiavelli related in a letter in 1513:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off the muddy, sweaty clothes of every day, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients where, being welcomed by them, I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born. And there I make bold and speak to them and ask the motives of their actions. And they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I am wholly absorbed in them.
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Besides other times of the day, an hour or two before bedtime was set aside by many for reading. According to estate inventories, personal libraries were frequently located in chambers where persons slept. Pepys, for one, often read at night. “I to my book again, and made an end of Mr. Hooker’s Life, and so to bed,” he recorded on May 19, 1667. On scattered evenings, he requested a servant to read aloud to him. During the nine years covered by his diary, Pepys read an estimated 125 books, most in their entirety. His tastes were far-flung. Along with traditional works of history and theology, he read widely in science and literature. Books sometimes occupied David Beck past midnight. “Came home at 11:00, read the entire Gospel of St. John,” he noted one November evening in 1624. Favorite fare for this budding Dutch poet included the verse of Jakob Cats and Pierre de Ronsard. In Somerset, John Cannon’s adolescent tastes ran to the occult as well as to Aristotle and the Bible. At age sixteen, he explored a book about midwifery in order to learn the “forbidden secrets of nature.” A hardworking husbandman, he read avidly despite the disapproval of the uncle who employed him. “For all these my hard & laborious employments,” noted Cannon in 1705, “I never slighted or disregarded my books, ye study of which augmented my understanding, stealing an opportunitie by day, but more by night and that when all was safe in bed, sitting up late.”
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Joseph Wright of Derby,
Girl Reading a Letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man Peering over Her Shoulder
, ca. 1760–1762.

Most of all, in this religious age, nocturnal solitude was reserved for expressions of personal piety. In the wake of the Reformation, growing numbers of theologians emphasized the importance of private acts of spirituality. Despite differences in doctrinal beliefs, Protestant and Catholic leaders alike sought to strengthen an individual’s relationship with God through private prayer. That occurred with greatest regularity at bedtime when individuals prepared for sleep. But even earlier, men and women were expected to perform devotional readings as well as to reflect on the day’s events. “Meditation and retired thoughts fit us for prayer,” noted Sarah Cowper.
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Jewish theologians encouraged nocturnal exercises, believing in the Maimonidean precept that “man acquires most of his wisdom by study at night.” According to the eighteenth-century rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, God, in punishing the “first man” for his “sin,” reserved daylight for labor. Long winter nights, by contrast, were meant for study of the Torah. “God darkened his world so man could study” and “focus and concentrate his mind and thoughts on God,” explained Eibeschütz.
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All this, despite the dangers and expense of artificial lighting by which to read. Of his eighteenth-century childhood in Yorkshire, Thomas Wright recalled poring over the Bible in bed by candlelight. “On this I used to read till twelve, one, or two o’clock in the morning, till I fell asleep, a dangerous practice.” Some youths had to fend for themselves, scavenging rushlights, pine knots, or small nubs of tallow. Although born to an aristocratic family, even François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, was forced as a student to steal candle-ends from chapel to read the sermons of Jean Baptiste Massillon, the renowned Bishop of Clermont. More fortunate was the sixteenth-century German student Friederich Behaim. Residing in the town of Altdorf, he received supplies of large candles from his mother in Nuremberg. “Buy yourself a few small candles,” she instructed in 1578, “and use them when you are not reading and writing so that the large candles may be saved for studying.”
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Whatever its source, the poor quality of artificial light proved difficult for readers. Pepys grew plagued by “sore eyes” and discontinued writing his diary at the age of thirty-six, fearing that he might go blind. Late hours spent working in his office were the principal cause, though books were an aggravation. “My eyes, with overworking them, are sore as soon as candlelight comes to them,” he lamented in 1666. A Lancashire physician complained of failing sight due to “reading and writing so much by candle light,” notwithstanding his efforts to use a “thick candle” and “to keep a steady light.”
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For small numbers of people, writing filled late hours. “It smells of the candle” was a saying reserved for midnight compositions. Not surprisingly, these hours were coveted by the author of
Night Thoughts
, poet Edward Young. At Oxford, to stimulate his creativity at midday, Young even drew his curtains and lit a lamp. John Milton, completely blind later in life (due, he believed, to a childhood penchant for reading at bedtime), composed verse at night in his head, which he dictated each morning to a scribe. Journals provided an increasingly popular outlet for self-reflection. Rarely were they intended for one’s family, much less the educated public—some diarists, like Pepys, wrote entries in cipher. Apart from reading books and keeping a diary, Beck poured his emotions at night into writing poetry. As a widower, he spent hours composing elegies to his deceased wife, Roeltje. “At night, until 1:00, I wrote the 2
nd
elegy upon the death of my dear departed wife,” he scribbled on January 2, 1624. Letters, too, addressed to intimate acquaintances, afforded a vehicle for personal thoughts. This was one of the joys of Laura Cereta, the young wife of an Italian merchant in the late fifteenth century. Responsible for helping to maintain her parents’ household as well as her own, she found rare freedom at night, especially from males in her family, to cultivate her many talents. Hours were lavished both on books (“my sweet night vigils of reading”) and needlework. The artistry involved in embroidering an intricate silk shawl, adorned with images of savage beasts, gave her special pleasure. To a close friend, she confided, “My firm rule, of saving the night for forbidden work, has allowed me to design a canvas that contains a harmonious composition of colors. The work has taken three months of sleepless nights.” Above all, Cereta composed long, highly introspective epistles, filled with classical allusions. As she described in one letter:

I have no leisure time for my own writing and studies unless I use the nights as productively as I can. I sleep very little. Time is a terribly scarce commodity for those of us who spend our skills and labor equally on our families and our own work. But by staying up all night, I become a thief of time, sequestering a space from the rest of the day.
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Such were the principal diversions of preindustrial folk when nights were free. Rather than retire with the sun, most people instead chose to prolong their evenings with like-minded souls of good cheer, whether families, friends, or lovers. Notwithstanding a small literate minority, intensely devoted like Laura Cereta to solitary study, large numbers delighted in hours of idle play and conviviality. Nights inside cramped dwellings and alehouses were as vibrant as they were ill lit. “Easier flows a song at night,” went a saying, “than a song by morning light.” Moderation, proclaimed a Polish song, “is for the day, eve and night to be gay.” That said, darkness brought the greatest freedom of all, not to the middle-class likes of David Beck and Samuel Pepys, but to men and women at opposite ends of the social spectrum. If night, the common benefactress, was a time of autonomy and license for most, it bore heightened significance for patricians and plebeians. It was the mean and the mighty, paradoxically, for whom darkness had the most profound bearing. Declared a sixteenth-century ballad, “Welcome the nights, / That double delights as well as [for] the poore as the peere.”
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